An English-Chinese Translation Report On The Boer War (Excerpts) From The Perspective Of Chesterman’s Theory Of Translation Norms

In recent years,with the emergence of a large number of excellent works,nonfiction and its translation have attracted much attention.In this context,the translator participated in the translation project of The Boer War.As a nonfiction work,The Boer War was written by the Dutch writer Bossenbroek and published by Seven Stories Press in 2018.With vivid and detailed narration,it attempts to recreate for readers the actual scene of the war between the Great Britain and two Boer republics.The translator is responsible for the translation of chapters 13 to 15 of The Boer War,and this report is written based on this translation practice.In order to maintain the three features of the original text,namely informative,documentary and literary,the translator chooses Chesterman’s theory of translation norms as the guiding theory in this practice.This report focuses on how the translator employs Chesterman’s theory of translation norms to solve problems encountered in the practice.From the macro perspective,expectancy norms and professional norms provide the general direction for the translator in the decision-making process as standards.From the micro perspective,the strategies at three levels offer the translator solutions to overcome difficulties in the translation process.At the syntactic level,the translator adopts transposition,unit shift,and clause structure change strategies to adjust the syntactic form,making the translation more in line with the Chinese expression habits and improving its readability.At the semantic level,abstraction change and hyponymy strategies are employed to deal with the changes of meaning flexibly,maximizing the communication effect.At the pragmatic level,the translator applies cultural filtering,explicitness change,and visibility change strategies to deal with message changes,so that the target text can reproduce the original information and the target language readers can obtain the same reading experience as the original language readers.With the increasing readership of nonfiction works,translation in this field is in high demand.This report summarizes the translation strategies adopted by the translator in translating The Boer War,and proves the wide applicability of Chesterman’s theory of translation norms in this translation practice.It is hoped that the report can provide some references for translators engaged in the translation practices and research of nonfiction.